IBM and ASAA work in collaboration with Watson Health Cloud and Apple to record the sleep habits of the participants.

The American Sleep Apnea Association (ASAA) has reported that 1 out of every four Americans face sleep problems including Sleep Apnea. They face disturbed sleep, loud snoring and constrained breathing.

Sleeping has been associated with the wellbeing of human beings. Sleep deprivation leads to physical and psychological disorders and diseases. So it is a major health concern for all health related workers.

Luckily the ASAA came up with a remedial strategy. Together with IBM, the ASAA has developed an app by the name of SleepHealth. SleepHealth has been designed on the Apple's ResearchKit framework.

The app is compatible with iPhones and Apple Watch as well. The app will collect the data about a person’s health related activities, sleep duration, sleeping patterns, heart rate and other significant data which it will then send to the Watson Health Cloud.

The app is a source of collecting data for researchers. It is one of the biggest longitudinal study where all app user will become participant for the potential studies, research topics, surveys and strategies for identifying solutions to sleep problems.

The participants can sign up on the app as participants after they have verified that they are over 18 years of age and submit their sleep data. Their data will then be stripped of personal detail before being stored in the Watson Health Cloud.

From here, it will be analysed by physicians and researchers for research purposes and also identifying healthy pro-sleep behavior.

“We’ve made life the laboratory for this study by crowd-sourcing data and input to achieve an unprecedented understanding of sleep in a non-invasive manner,” said Carl Stepnowsky, PhD, the principal investigator for the study, associate professor at University of California at San Diego and ASAA’s chief science officer.

“This study also marks the Association’s commitment to patient-led research and data-driven discovery. With ResearchKit and Watson Health Cloud, this new app will help us build the world’s largest longitudinal study to collect data on both healthy and unhealthy sleepers that can be published as an open study and shared with other researchers.”

Kyu Rhee, chief health officer for Watson Health, said that it is an effort to break the barriers and bring together physicians, researchers, patients and clinicians and bring them together on a single platform to see a problem up close and find causes and solutions.

It will be an interactive research effort where the patients and clients will participate as much as the researchers and clinicians.

“One of our goals at IBM Watson Health is to eliminate silos that hinder collaboration between researchers, patients and clinicians, and create opportunities for these communities to share and learn from one another,” said Kyu Rhee, M.D., chief health officer for Watson Health.

“It is exciting to see Watson Health and our ecosystem of partners help advance our understanding of how an essential, yet often under-appreciated factor like sleep impacts so many health outcomes like heart disease and diabetes.”

“As someone who suffered for years with undiagnosed sleep apnea, I’m eager to see how this app contributes to our understanding of sleep health and its connection to serious health conditions,” said Adam Amdur, ASAA’s chief patient officer, co-investigator, and the father of a young child battling the condition.

“SleepHealth is the first ResearchKit study developed by an all patient team of researchers and advocates, and we believe it has the potential to be the largest international sleep study ever. Our ultimate goal is to uncover patterns to advance good sleep practices, optimize health and predict who is at risk for sleep disorders or other medical conditions.”

The SleepHealth app is available to anyone in the U.S. as a free download from the App Store. This app will available globally in the near future.

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